17th June 2018, 5:00 PM
Yes, after decades of never re-releasing the arcade version of Donkey Kong, spurring many rumors of if Nintendo has the rights to it at all -- because of how Nintendo treated the outside team that did the programming, pretty much -- they... suddenly released it for Arcade Archives on the Switch! That's pretty awesome. I've never really loved the original DK, but still, it's really fantastic that the original arcade version finally, at long last, has an official home console release. It includes the Japanese and International versions of the game, too, which is great. And it was released during E3.
And at the same time, Nintendo also announced that next month they will release the arcade version of Sky Skipper, another arcade game from 1981. The game released in Japan in arcades, and there is a Western-released Atari 2600 version (that I have a copy of; it's not great), but for some reason the Western arcade release was cancelled. Yes, a 2600 version, which is not mentioned in the Treehouse stream video above, was released here, but not the arcade game. How odd. Anyway, this Arcade Archives version is a port of the US arcade version, which Nintendo kept one of in their archives after cancelling it. The cabinet has some pretty neat artwork done by Miyamoto on it, see the video. I haven't played arcade Sky Skipper, but it looks okay based on the video, better than that 2600 version hopefully but not great. Still, it's awesome to see it, and I hope that the classic Nintendo arcade releases continue; they do have more.